Browsed byCategory: Life

There’s a particular kind of impostor syndrome that comes from being English in Celtic Studies, as an academic field. No matter how many qualifications you get, how hard you work on language skills, how much you know, you can’t change the fact that the stories you’re talking about aren’t your stories, that the landscape it describes isn’t the country you come from. I call it Sasanach Syndrome. It intensifies acutely every time I tell somebody what I studied and they…

I used to be a bully. Adults around me said that I was ‘bossy’, but really, I was controlling. I liked having power over people. I saw friends as people who were supposed to do what you wanted them to do, which tended to mean I gathered friends who were shy and retiring and then bossed them around a lot, until inevitably they learned how to stand up for themselves and found friends who were more chilled out. There was…

And so as 2019 races on, I continue to be terrible at blogging, which will come as no surprise to anybody. I am genuinely considering amalgamating my two blogs, so that I only have one to fail at maintaining, but I’m not actually sure how to combine the archives and I feel like ultimately that would probably be a bad idea, so I guess we’ll just leave things as they are for now. (Well, apart from the name change that…

You know how I’ve been saying since 2015 that I want to change my professional name? And then in 2017 I tried again and didn’t actually get anywhere? Well, I think I finally might be close to actually, like, doing it, at long last. And you thought this day would never come… I’ve more or less settled on the name Finn Longman, despite my initial reluctance to use the name Longman. I’ve been trying out Longmore, as a variant, but…

I started using the name Miriam Joy in 2011. Until then I’d been mostly using the username @delorfinde — that was the name I was known by on Protagonize, which was by far the platform where I was most active, but also on Twitter and the NaNoWriMo website and more or less everywhere else I signed up between 2007 and 2011. (The only place I still use the name delorfinde is on the NaNo website. For a long time you…

I’ve been trying to think about what my main goals for 2019 are, but I’m finding it tricky. A year is a long time — as I said in my last post, while I didn’t achieve everything I set out to do last year, I also achieved a bunch of things it would never have occurred to me to aim for, because things change. This year is particularly unpredictable because it’s my first year out of education in, like, nineteen…

Every New Year I find myself thinking about a previous New Year’s Eve, one that’s barely a fragment of memory: sitting in my kitchen as my uncle and grandad, sitting near the radiator, turned to each other, and said, “Well, well, well. 2002.” At this point I’m not even sure if it’s a real memory, but it’s one I’ve gone over so many times in my head that it feels like one. 2018’s been quite a year. Politically tumultuous, to…

Oh, hey, uhhhh…. not dead. *waves* Hello. Sorry. I vanished off the face of the earth. Turns out: working in a bookshop is super tiring! Especially when you’re working full time for the two weeks before Christmas, AND ALSO writing a novel with whatever leftover brainpower you can scrape together! I mean, I don’t think that’s COMPLETELY to blame for my total absence from blogging since mid-November, but it’s definitely part of it. I guess I’ve also just shifted over…

I should probably stop calling myself a blogger, shouldn’t I? Maybe I should opt for a more truthful title: “bookworm and writer who occasionally posts updates on their blog, roughly once a month”. It’s like… once it’s been a couple of weeks, it’s hard to know what’s worth breaking your silence for, and so it just stretches on and on. Also, it’s been busy! I’ve got a bunch of news to share with you, which I’ll do in roughly chronological…

Yikes. I’d just got back on the blogging wagon, and then I fell off it again. I’m sorry for my extended silence. I haven’t been doing brilliantly the last few weeks — I’ve had some bad pain flare-ups, along with the migraines I’ve been suffering for the last couple of months, and am barely finding time to do anything. Where I do have any time, I’m tending to use it to work on Bard, which means I’ve been reading very…